Cometbus Portal Deluxe

I don’t like doing reviews, so here are my thoughts on the cometbus//green day zine that you can still buy at microcosm publishing [should still be in stock]

In the spirit of the Gupter Puncher zine, I added Blake’s 7, zine shop portals and prague into this thing to try and hold your attention…

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Lisbon London Zagreb Ljubljana none of them had cometbus on tour with green day in china so I ended up at the cross club in prague with Joanna.

Avon’s book said it was famous for creatives & socialists & sometimes anarchists and if you went at the right time of day they might have the cometbus zine you’re looking for.

I didn’t go there first – I trusted Avon, he wasn’t moral, he was going to shoot Vila and dump his body off the ship just to reach escape velocity in season 4 episode 11, and he did shoot Blake [at his most Mexican-looking], but he had no reason to lie this time – I went to another place that sold zines but that was closed so I left one of my mega man zines under their shutter blind and headed to the cross club.

The other zine place never got back to me, fuckers, even though I left my e-mail. I try not to dwell on things like this but it’s hard, especially when I wrote the word ‘e-mail’ in Czech.

The Cross Club…

it was well-designed and the floor was sticky from the night before and I guess it was the right time cos they had the cometbus zine, issue 54, and more than that, they had a portal in one of the back rooms that led to other zine stores including one in Hong Kong that I’d never heard of, and from that portal you could even go further, to all the planets in Blake’s 7, which never looked thatalien anyway and only ever had a population of 12, but the concept was solid and the portal seemed stable so in I went and out I went all the way to the animal episode of season 4 where Dayna was crying over the paedophile and Avon was staring with his gun aimed right at my neck and, fuck, Avon, it’s me, the guy who bought your guide book, the one about prague, and if you put the gun down and let me go then I can buy you a coffee and tell you about this cometbus zine I’m looking for, the one where he’s apologising for green day, or half apologising, he’s pretty balanced most of the time, probably because at the end of it all they’re still his friends and it takes a really cold or really idealistic person to take apart their friends, especially when they’ve paid for the hotels and the flights and the prostitutes.

Meanwhile Dayna has stopped crying and now remembers that Servalan is the source of all her pain and she’s been treading water on revenge for the last season and a half and now that her one episode lover’s dead, it’s time to act, right now, where’s Servalan’s trailer, I want her dead, where is she, but before she can grab a knife or a hammer the credits are rolling and Avon’s calling her over to join us, take up a seat, Dayna, you too Su Lin, Tarrant, Vila, sit down and listen to this guy talk about my prague guide book and a zine done by a comet, it’s pretty cool, way better than walking around Norfolk or Suffolk pretending it’s an alien world, just cos the BBC were too tight to give us decent money to film this thing, even four seasons in, ha, maybe we should make a zine too, something sci-fi in nature but also like this comet zine at the same time.

Tarrant raised a hand and said, ‘Avon, what the fuck?’

‘Well, you always said you felt safe with me, Vila.’

‘Wrong episode,’ said Vila.

‘Oh.’

I see things going south so I nudge Avon and tell him to say, ‘I like the part where he goes to Osaka.’

He says it. Everyone nods.

‘I laughed when he thought he might die wandering around a middle class area in Bangkok.’

He says that too.

More nodding.

Episode six begins and everyone stands up and walks over to the next set, ready to go into the breach thing again and treat each other like shit, so I jump back into the portal and re-materialise in a friendlier universe with Sisko and Kira and the spy who came in from the cold.